6 Answers
6

I would recommend slaving both of them to a secondary machine, and doing a disk to disk ghost image. Or you could use one of several other free programs, or pay the money and get Acronis and be super happy.

I already did that with clonezila, the only problem is if your ssd have less capacity of space then your HDD clonezila will not recover the image (maybe any image manager can do it if you try to recover a large partition on a short space hard disk). The solution for this problem is resize your partition for the space that your SSD provides.

To resize your partitions i recommend you using EASEUS software.
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DiogoMay 19 '11 at 18:44

The existing main (rotating) drive is bigger, but I only want the C: partition, which is smaller (70G, I think). The other parts were used for other OS's. The user data is on a separate drive.
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daveh551May 20 '11 at 0:42

I heavily recommend Clonezilla for backing up and restoring an entire computer. Simply grab the latest copy of Clonezilla, burn it to a CD or make a bootable USB thumb drive, and do a device-to-device backup operation.

Once Clonezilla is done, you will have a perfect 1-1 image on both drives.

Edit: I am assuming that the SSD Size >= Old HD Size. Otherwise you'll need to shrink the old partition before you can clone the disk to another disk.

Perhaps you were downvoted because assuming that SSD size >= HDD size is not realistic. To match the capacity of a current $80 one terabyte HDD, you'd have to spend more than $2000 on an SSD. That would be my guess. newegg.com/Product/…
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skypecakesMay 24 '11 at 0:02

Well that flat out doesn't make since. That statement is just simply fact. If the new SSD is not >= the Old HD you can't do a straight clone operation like my answer stated. It simply was a clarification, not a question about how realistic a "purchase" would be.
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UrdaMay 24 '11 at 12:54

Point taken; it was just a guess. If your answer is based on an assumption, and the assumption is highly unlikely, it makes your answer less likely to be useful. It's certainly possible that the asker's SSD is >= in size to the HDD.
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skypecakesMay 24 '11 at 23:24

@skypecakes possible but very unlikely. The largest consumer SSDs I've seen are ~250Gb. They cost about $200. A 2Tb HD is about $120 ATM. So SSDs are about 16x the cost per meg. So the question now is: how do you resize the image (assuming the image has enough free space that can be removed to make it small enough to fit on the smaller SSD).
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localhostApr 5 '13 at 0:01

@user, yeah. See my first comment. "Perhaps you were downvoted because assuming that SSD size >= HDD size is not realistic."
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skypecakesApr 5 '13 at 4:46

I just did this very thing on my Lenovo Tablet over the weekend, went off without a hitch; My SSD drive was also smaller than my original. I used an old version of Ghost that is on my Hiren Boot Cd and did a simple drive to drive copy.

Make no mistaken this isn't just a tweak that gives 0.5% boost in performance, this is actually very significant and there are resounding benchmarks that show a stark contrast in performance between a properly aligned SSD and an incorrectly aligned SSD.